


Scales, skin

by Trojie



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Forgery, Gen, Military Backstory, Pre-Slash, Project Somnacin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-01
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2018-01-07 00:45:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1113476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur and Eames are working together as part of Project Somnacin, taking part in a training exercise, when Eames does something no-one's ever seen before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scales, skin

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my hc_bingo 2013 card, prompt 'first transformation'.

'They've split their forces,' says Arthur, crouching down next to Eames and shouldering his rifle so that he can sketch a map in the dirt in front of them with a grubby forefinger. 'A two-man squad is coming at us from the treeline to the east,' he murmurs, working quickly. 'The other two-man squad and their group leader are approaching from the south. Any word from Kendrick and Lamarr?'

'Their radio went dead five minutes ago,' Eames says, keeping his voice equally low. 'Think they're down.' 

'Target's above the treeline,' Arthur points out. 'Since they took out Kendrick and Lamarr I guess they think the most efficient thing is to take us out too before going for the flag, rather than trying to race us there.'

Eames and Arthur share a look. Maybe this is only a training exercise in dream navigation, but in six months of knowing him Eames has come to the following conclusion about Arthur - he is a competitive little shit. And well, Eames likes that about him. 

'So, we're going east, then?' Eames says just a little bit gleefully. 

Arthur pulls out his sidearm and chambers a round, and smiles like a shark. 

***

'What the everloving fuck was _that?'_ demands Sergeant Mills. 'Eames, report.'

Eames stifles the bile in his throat and swallows hard and says, 'We approached the target under cover, confirmed visuals on the red team's second squad, but the vegetation was too thick to reliably neutralise them both without putting our squad in danger. Instead, Private Goldman made for higher ground to snipe from, and to draw attention from him, I got closer to the red squad with the intention of impersonating Corporal Rushman's voice and ordering them to redeploy away from the target zone. It was childish, sir, I am aware of that, but I was simply attempting to act as a decoy.'

It was a stupid move and it probably wouldn't have worked, but he'd figured it was worth a try and anyway Arthur was manoeuvering around to a vantage point to use as a sniper post, so as long as he could duck faster than Trenly could shoot, Eames had figured he was safe enough. And they've been playing Capture the Flag for a month. He was bored.

'And then what happened?' Mills says irritably. She plants her hands on her hips and stares down at him. 'Your vitals went nuts. Trenly kicked himself out unscheduled. Something else happened down there, Eames, and it wasn't just a goddam schoolboy prank.'

'I … I don't know,' Eames admits shakily, trying to control his voice and probably failing. The sounds he's making feel too deep, his throat feels too smooth. 

'Trenly?'

The red squad's 2IC yanks his line and sits up. 'It was Rushman,' he says. 'Only it couldn't have been, sir, because we'd just heard over our radios that she'd been kicked from above. And anyway she was supposed to be with squad one over on the other side of the river.' He shrugs. 'I don't have an explanation, sir. That's all I know. It was Rushman, right there in front of us, but it _couldn't_ have been.'

Arthur clears his throat. 'I saw it happen,' he says. 'Through my rifle scope. Private Eames approached red squad two from the west, as we'd discussed, and I saw him stop and check his cover, in earshot of Privates Trenly and Stevens, and then go to speak. And then … I'm not sure, sir, I must have blinked, but it wasn't Private Eames I could see in my scope any more, it was Corporal Rushman. She ordered her squad to about-face, which is when Private Trenly's failsafe must have activated and kicked him out. I imagine the surprise of apparently seeing the corporal must have caused an adrenaline spike the system picked up as a possible fault,' he adds evenly, which is kind of him. Eames knows how Arthur feels about people who have overactive panic responses. 

Eames is feeling an overactive panic response himself right about now. He remembers recalling Rushman's inflection, her smoker's cough and how it edges her glottal consonants, and that he was trying to think of how to word the order, how she'd do it, and he kind of squared up the way she does, being on the lower end of the height requirements and having to claim authority over taller people, and then he stepped forward without thinking about it and the world went interestingly sideways-feeling for a moment, and then there was shock in Trenly's eyes, and he disappeared, and then the world itself folded as Mills must have kicked them all when Trenly woke topside. 

Just for a second, though, Eames had felt shorter, more aggressive, and he'd had a craving for cigarettes like he hadn't felt in years. 

***

'Sergeant gave us the victory, on the logbook,' Arthur says leaning next to Eames against the brick wall out the back of the mess. Sun's pretty much gone down now. Eames bummed a cigarette off Petersen after they'd been debriefed twice (once by the technical staff, once by the brass) and dismissed, and came out here to smoke it.

His mouth tastes fucking foul now. And his hands haven't quite stopped shaking. 

'Good,' he forces himself to say. 'You were closest to the target, still armed and undetected by the red team. Rules are rules.'

'They're not entirely sure that what you did doesn't count as cheating.'

'Fuck 'em, I didn't do it deliberately.' Eames grinds the dead stub of the cigarette under the toe of his boot, and glares at the ashy smear it leaves. Gonna have to polish his damn boots again. Feels like such a waste of time, now he knows how easy it is to just dream up a mirror-polished pair. Why do they care what his uniform looks like topside when they make him spend most of his time _down there_ , anyway? 'But did you see that little tit Trenly, though? Gave him the fright of his fucking life. That was fun.'

Arthur gives Eames a sidelong glance, and adds, 'The higher-ups think it could be an asset, if it wasn't just a fluke.'

Eames snorts. 'I hope it was a bloody fluke,' he says. 'You been eavesdropping, Private Goldman?'

'Only when it's relevant to my squad.' _My_ squad, Eames notes without rancour. He's been Arthur's squad since day one. He's okay with it. Enough testosterone-filled egos around here, he can't be bothered making a stand about it. 

He shivers. It's getting cold, and his skin doesn't seem to fit right just now, it hasn't since he got kicked out of the dream. 'Don't 'spose I can bum another fag off you, can I?'

Arthur's mouth goes tight. 'Thought you didn't smoke,' he says, but he pulls a packet out of his breast pocket anyway.

'I don't,' says Eames, taking one and sliding it between his lips. 'You got a light?'

Arthur pulls out a zippo and yanks the cigarette from Eames's mouth to light it himself. He takes a drag himself, too, before he passes it back. His fingers brush Eames's. They're warm. Eames shivers. 

Corporal Rushman penalised Arthur with push-ups when he committed his few, infrequent minor infractions against authority in bootcamp, Eames remembers suddenly, apparently apropos of nothing. He remembers noticing how consistent she was on that. And now, he realises, he remembers that she did it because Arthur's arse is frankly stunning in a pair of PT shorts. 

That isn't his memory. It isn't really a memory, it's … it's an extrapolation. 

He almost drops the cigarette. That nebulous feeling of _fitting wrong _that he was fighting off during debrief swamps him again for a second. Then Arthur's shoulder buts up against his. 'Give me that,' he says, taking the cigarette again, and this time his fingertips brush Eames's lips for a split second. 'Just breathe, Eames. Just breathe. It'll pass.'__

__And it does. Arthur standing beside him, just touching, gives Eames a weird sense of scale. He and Arthur have been a two-man squad for six months, have basically been joined at the hip the whole time. He knows how tall he should be next to Arthur. He knows how much slower he breathes than Arthur does, how Arthur's boots are slightly longer than his._ _

__Beside him, Arthur smokes the cigarette down to the filter and tosses it down, glowing. He grinds it out with the toe of his longer boot._ _

__'You think you can do it again?' Arthur asks after a while. 'They are going to ask you to, I guarantee it.'_ _

__'I don't know,' Eames says. 'Honest to God, I really don't know.'_ _

__'If you can, if you can control it, it'll be a hell of a new development,' Arthur says. Eames finds himself noting how Arthur says it, controlledly nonchalant, but how his shoulders tighten up against Eames's at the same time._ _

__He wonders what it would be like to be in Arthur's skin, what sudden revelations he might get from feeling Arthur's shape from the inside._ _

__To be honest, it's not the doing it again part Eames is worried about. He thinks he remembers how he did it, how he found that shape and stepped into it. He thinks, yeah, he probably could do it again. Frankly, that was the easy part. He could do that over and over and over again, he thinks._ _

__The bit he's worried about is the bit where he has to come back, over and over and over again, and if he'll be able to do it without Arthur to measure himself against._ _


End file.
